Getting Fat Through No Fault Of My Own

March 10, 1988|By Andy Rooney, Tribune media service

I'm only talking to overweight people today. The rest of you can move on to something else.

Haven't you often felt it was unfair that, day after day, you see skinny people eating french fries and chocolate fudge sundaes and never gaining a pound? Haven't you noticed that a lot of people eat exactly the same things you eat and they stay the same weight while you blow up?

It is one of the unfairest things I've come across in my lifetime, but there's good news. Thin people of the world owe an apology to all of us average, normal, everyday overweight people.

If we had all been falsely imprisoned, we wouldn't have been any more falsely maligned than we have been by thin people all these years. They always suggest it's our own fault, and it is not.

Why? Because according to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, it isn't fat people's fault that they're fat. After years of being looked down on by people who act superior because their collarbones stick out, the truth finally has emerged. It isn't us, it's our metabolism that's to blame.

Make no mistake about this announcement, it's good news for overweights. It could mean the end of Weight Watchers and the feeling of inferiority we all feel because we're fat. It's really good to know my weight is not a result of weakness or any flaw in my character. It is apparent that I have a very lethargic metabolism. A big piece of chocolate cake goes further in my body than it does in the body of a skinny person. It isn't that fat people eat too much, it's that their furnaces are always banked.

''Obese people,'' says Dr. Jules Hirsch, a doctor at Rockefeller University in New York, ''are born with a handicap. Just like people born with other handicaps, they'll have to learn to live with theirs.''

Next thing you know, they'll be giving us handicapped, overweight people stickers for our cars so we can park right up near the entrance to the store in the handicapped parking places.

The doctors' report says that when an overweight person makes a big effort to diet and loses weight, his or her metabolism declines even further. As the metabolism declines, the body uses less and less of the food taken in and turns the rest to fat. That's why it's so hard to keep off the weight you lose.

The researchers for this project kept track of their subjects for two years. They found that the people who were destined to gain weight burned 80 calories a day fewer than people of comparable weight. Dr. Eric Ravussin of the National Institutes of Health estimated that a person who burns a mere 80 calories a day less than usual would gain 9 pounds a year.

According to these figures in the story, I must have a world-champion low rate of metabolism. I've been gaining 9 pounds a year for years. It's wonderful to know that it isn't my fault. And if my body runs at idle all day long, I should think it would last longer than if I were racing my engine.

I can hardly wait to get home and celebrate with a big dinner and a bowl of ice cream for dessert.